What are Peptides?

Peptides are powerful biological signalling mechanisms, to put simply they are small proteins, most notably used by athletes to stimulate production of human growth hormone, bioidentical peptides have a variety of potential uses in terms of treating mental dysfunction and human enhancement.

In the body peptides function in many roles, such as as neurotransmitters and as hormonal signalling intermediates.

Interestingly peptide production in the human body depreciates as the body ages, leading to a lot less hormonal and neurotransmitters signalling, there is good evidence to believe aging is long term process starting from adulthood.

Introduction to Oxytocin

Oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus – the almond sized region of the brain located close to the brain stem that links the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland. It’s released either via the pituitary gland straight into the bloodstream or to other parts of the brain and the spinal cord.

The hormone Oxytocin is probably best known for its role in childbirth and breastfeeding, although research has established that the Oxytocin drug can help forge deep connections with our partners, our children, our friends and even our pets. Excitingly, the Oxytocin orgasm is powerful for both men and women. It’s been shown to enhance orgasm – and induce multiple orgasms in women. Oxytocin is called the “love hormone” because it enhances touch, bonding, sociability and trust.

Lately research has suggested and proven that Oxytocin is of use for people suffering from autism due to the empathetic tendencies of Oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone found higher naturally in women, which is a reason why they are more responsive to touch, have higher empathy and able to read body language better than men.

Oxytocin is being used in research for mood swings (depression), drug addiction, autism, anxiety, schizophrenia, pain (particularly for fibromyalgia) and even as an aid to weight loss, (principally through appetite reduction); but perhaps oxytocin’s most highlighted use has been to help couples enjoy a closer (bonding/ loving) relationships and for individuals.

Though personally I think Oxytocin‘s biggest use may be for Autism.

Closer and Closer to an Official Treatment for Autistic Spectrum Disorders and Social Abilities Enhancement

Oxytocin is being heavily researched and tested for treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders, for those unfamiliar with ausitistic disorders, one of the hallmarks is the lack of social callibration and the inability to read body language of others properly. Proponents of the “intense world theory” would argue that autistic people do not lack empathy as previously believed by the mainstream. In fact autistic people may simply be too empathetic and too sensitive for normal social callibration.

The role of endogenous oxytocin as neuromodulator of birth, lactation and social behaviors is well-recognized. Moreover, the use of oxytocin as a facilitator of social and other behaviors is becoming more and more accepted. Many positive effects have been attributed to intranasal oxytocin administration in animals and humans.

Over 12 weeks of treatment, several measures of social cognition/function, repetitive behaviors and anxiety showed sensitivity to change with some measures suggesting maintenance of effect 3 months past discontinuation of intranasal oxytocin.

This also means that its highly likely that Oxytocin in general enhances social skills and the ability to read body language and communite “in sync” socially, this would largely explain why women tend to have less incidents of autism, as they inantely have larger levels of Oxytocin in their bodies.

Recent studies have suggested oxytocin‘s therapeutic effects on deficits in social communication and interaction in autism spectrum disorder through improvement of emotion recognition with direct emotional cues, such as facial expression and voice prosody. Although difficulty in understanding of others’ social emotions and beliefs under conditions without direct emotional cues also plays an important role in autism spectrum disorder, no study has examined the potential effect of oxytocin on this difficulty.

The present findings suggest thatoxytocin enhances the ability to understand others’ social emotions that have also required second-order false belief rather than first-order false beliefs under conditions without direct emotional cues in autism spectrum disorder at both the behaviour and neural levels.

The Effects of the Hormone Oxytocin in Love

Oxytocin is essential in our desire for touch, being touched leads to an rise in Oxytocin levels. This reaction in the body leads to the release of endorphins and testosterone. Which is why massages or kissing feels so good…Oxytocin is responsible for love like arousal.

Erogenous zones including earlobes, neck and genitals become sensitized to the effect of the hormone, and the body and mind become receptive and proactive in sexual activity. It not only arouses blood and the senses, but also promotes a bond of intimacy and closeness. The cycle continues to fire these pleasure giving endorphins and hormones and we naturally produce more Oxytocin and feel more pleasure as a reward.

By stimulating genital areas and causing the nerves to fire spontaneously, orgasm is reached far easier and more powerfully. In orgasm, male Oxytocin levels quintuple, while women need higher levels if they are to reach orgasm. And during peak sexual arousal, the Oxytocin levels become very high indeed. At this point multiple orgasms can occour.

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Oxytocin’s further health and wellbeing benefits

Using Oxytocin can also help regulate sleep patterns, and have a calming effect. Research is ongoing but observation seems to cite Oxytocin’s health giving benefits lying in its ability to counteract stress and the effects of the stress hormone cortisol. Nearly every disease and condition is aggravated by stress; anything that can help counteract the stress is therefore useful.

That said in my personal experience Oxytocin can be a double edged sword, whilst it fosters trust from others, it also increases your own trust in others, leading you to be much more vulnerable to other people, because Oxytocin makes you trust everyone.

Oxytocin Nasal Spray Dosage

Nasal spray is highly effective and is the method of administration used in almost all studies, diluting Oxytocin into the order of international units also prevents Oxytocin overdose which can be dangerous. Needless to say Oxytocin in large doses is used to stimulate child birth and is also nothing like Oxytocinnasal spray.

Oxytocin is released via the pituitary hormone and it has been clinically proven to have a number of beneficial effects. As outlined in Dr. Thierry Hertoghe’s recent book ‘passion, sex and longevity, the oxytocin adventure’, oxytocin is being used for mood swings (depression), drug addition, autism, anxiety, schizophrenia, pain (particularly for fibromyalgia) and even as an aid to weight loss, (principally through appetite reduction); but perhaps oxytocin’s most highlighted use has been to help couples enjoy a closer (bonding/ loving) relationships and for individuals, (in particular for women- which in this case is unusual) to have more intense orgasms.

Investigated possible problems of large dosage of oxytocin over a long term of period

Oxytocin was administrated in a stepwise increased dosage manner

In every two months, they increased the daily dosage by 8 IU – going from 8, 16, then 24 IU

A placebo period was given in between every two months (1 – 2 weeks)

Reported very similar to the above study, mannerism was improved over the course of 7 months with no reported side effects

The Yale researchers did study oxytocin’s effect on such social interactions and are analyzing those results for later publication, said Ilanit Gordon, a co-author of the study.

The Yale team suggests that oxytocin may be most useful not as a continuous treatment to enhance general social skills, but as a tool to help children benefit more from behavioral therapy or specific social experiences.

In men with autism but not in controls, oxytocin also boosted brain activity in the amygdala, a brain region that processes emotion. The greater the change in amygdala activity, the greater the improvements in emotion recognition, the study found.

In the other study, published in the February issue of JAMA Psychiatry, researchers looked at the effect of oxytocin on brain activity in 33 men as they watched videos. The videos consist of an actor saying a word that either matches or conflicts with his facial expression and tone of voice. The participants were told to decide whether the actor seemed like a friend or a foe.

Each participant performed the test twice, once after taking oxytocin and once after placebo. Oxytocin boosts brain activity in the prefrontal cortex in people with autism to levels that resemble those in controls, the study found. It also increases the likelihood that men with autism will use nonverbal cues to make judgments, and it shortens their response time in the case of incongruent information.

Together, the two studies suggest that oxytocin may normalize social brain activity in people with autism.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES:

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined effects of oxytocin on behavioral neural responses of the participants to a social psychological task. In our previous case-control study using the same psychological task, when making decisions about social information with conflicting verbal and nonverbal contents, participants with ASD made judgments based on nonverbal contents less frequently with longer time and could not induce enough activation in the medial prefrontal cortex. Therefore, our main outcomes and measures were the frequency of the nonverbal information-based judgments (NVJs), the response time for NVJs, and brain activity of the medial prefrontal cortex during NVJs.

RESULTS:

Intranasal oxytocin enabled the participants to make NVJs more frequently (P = .03) with shorter response time (P = .02). During the mitigated behavior, oxytocin increased the originally diminished brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (P < .001). Moreover, oxytocin enhanced functional coordination in the area (P < .001), and the magnitude of these neural effects was predictive of the behavioral effects (P ≤ .01).

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE:

These findings provide the first neurobiological evidence for oxytocin‘s beneficial effects on sociocommunicational deficits of ASD and give us the initial account for neurobiological mechanisms underlying any beneficial effects of the neuropeptide.

Mitigation of sociocommunicational deficits of autism through oxytocin-induced recovery of medial prefrontal activity: a randomized trial.

FINDINGS:

Several studies suggest that giving oxytocin to both individuals with ASD and neurotypical individuals can enhance performance on social cognitive tasks. Studies that have attempted to intervene in joint attention in ASD suggest that social motivation may be a particular obstacle to lasting effects.

CONCLUSIONS:

The review of the evidence for the SMH suggests a potential role for oxytocin in social motivation deficits in ASD. Because of its importance for later communicative and social development, the focus here is on implications of oxytocin and social motivation in the development of and interventions in joint attention. Joint attention is a central impairment in ASD, and as a result is the focus of several behavioral interventions. In describing this previous research on joint attention interventions in ASD, we pay particular attention to problems encountered in such studies, and propose ways that oxytocin may facilitate behavioral intervention in this area. For future research, integrating behavioral and pharmacological interventions (oxytocin administration) would be a worthwhile experimental direction to improve understanding of the role of oxytocin in ASD and help optimize outcomes for children with ASD.